Category: News

A new product for Windows-based Linux admins

A multi-tool for Linux administrators

Building on experience from its MAGNAPing infrastructure monitoring system, Zenith Elevate is announcing the launch of a new product for Linux administrators: MAGNABoard.

Register and manage as many remote Linux hosts as you need, from the comfort of a Windows GUI environment! Use passwords or SSH certificates, for authentication. Go crazy and login as root or stay safe and use sudo. Compare host configuration in an easy-to-use, tabbed UI. No more need to type commands into text-based terminals, pipe outputs to files, or to transfer files back and forth, over SSH/FTP. Even if you need a file from the host, MAGNABoard may already have an export feature for it.

It is a tool that manages a growing number of facets of Linux hosts. Currently, in its Beta stage, it supports:

  • User, group, and session administration. Sudoer administration WIP.
  • Firewall management. WIP.
  • Package/repo management (RHEL/Fedora/CentOS dnf/rpm).
  • Kernel module management.
  • Cron/anacron scheduled task management.
  • Built-in host file browser with chmod, chown, mkdir, and touch for complete file management.

All of the above facets can be loaded at the same time, in parallel, and for as many hosts as necessary, for administration, comparison, and synchronization (manual, for now).

Beta testers wanted! Use Contact Us form at Zenith Elevate or PM me on Linkedin for your free copy of the Beta version.

Roadmap

Coming soon is a number of features such as:

  • Systemd services and timers management.
  • Expanded support for Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and other Linux flavours, and possibly for other UNIces, such as FreeBSD and whatnot.
  • Expanded comparison that currently exists in package management.
  • Synchronization of hosts’ configurations.
  • Built-in basic terminal emulator.
  • Generation/distribution of SSH keys.

I welcome and appreciate user input, and Beta testers will have a chance to influence further development, with the feedback about their needs.

Copyright © Zenith Elevate, 2022. All rights reserved.

User exits and built-in web server are released

As we strive to make MAGNAPing the IT infrastructure monitoring solution of choice for our customers, we build on our tradition of making it the most powerful, flexible, and user-friendly system on the market. Today, Zenith Elevate is happy to announce the availability of two new features that make MAGNAPing even more powerful and flexible.

User Exits

User exits are events that fire during the ping process and allow the user to hook their own, custom handlers up. A total of eight events are available right now:

  • BeforePing: Occurs before a ping is attempted.
  • BeforeMarkFailed: Occurs before a URL is marked as failed.
  • AfterMarkFailed: Occurs after a URL is marked as failed.
  • BeforeMarkRestored: Occurs before a URL is marked as restored.
  • AfterMarkRestored: Occurs after a URL is marked as restored.
  • AfterPing: Occurs after the ping is complete.
  • BeforeNotify: Occurs before a notification is sent.
  • AfterNotify: Occurs after the notification is sent.

Each event can invoke a user’s program and pass to it the URL currently being processed, the user name associated with the URL, and some tokens. The standard token substitution is applied. Please see the administrator’s manual for more information.

The program can be a command-line application, a script, or a .NET assembly. Both Full Framework and Standard assemblies are supported.

This latest feature’s possible use cases can be custom logging or any additional processing not currently supported by MAGNAPing.

Built-in Web Server

A light-weight HTTP server is now included with MAGNAPing. It outsources all HTTP processing or HTTPS encryption to the operating system and focuses on query processing. The server operates in two modes: visual and service.

In the visual mode, the server presents an HTML document that is fully customizable and skinnable by the user. Again, the standard token substitution applies. By viewing the document through a browser, the user can quickly remotely check the instance status, without having to log into the host that is running the MAGNAPing instance or to run SQL queries or reports.

In the service mode, the server acts as a RESTful endpoint for integration into 3d-party monitoring applications or dashboards. It returns individual token values, in a number of formats specified on the query string:

  • JSON
  • XML
  • HTML
  • Plain text

This latest feature allows for low-effort integration of MAGNAPing instances into your exiting central monitoring solutions. It also provides the operations staff peace of mind because we all realize that notification delivery is prone to 3d-party issues, and the lack of failure notifications is not proof of business as usual.

MAGNAPing has been ported to .NET Core

We are pleased to announce that the porting of MAGNAPing to .NET Core is now complete. The .NET Core category has been added to our online store, and you can shop for Core-based products as well as for the products based on the full Framework.

Currently, only Windows platform is supported. The support for Linux and other UNIX-like platforms may be added in the future.

Some functionality had to be altered or removed, due to the lack of support for it under .NET Core:

  • MS Access plugin can no longer create new databases. A blank copy of a database has been made available in the plugin package, to be used as a stub, every time the plugin needs a new database.
  • PostgreSQL plugin no longer supports Min and Max Pool size parameters of the connection string.
  • Informix plugin now connects through IBM.Data.DB2.Core library. The implication is that the server has to allow DRDA connections. The connection string format also changed from Informix client’s to DB2 client’s syntax.
  • iSeries plugin now connects over ODBC. The connection string format changed from the native iSeries client’s to ODBC client’s syntax.

Head over to the online store to order your copy of MAGNAPing and its plugins and stay tuned for further development!

MAGNAPing IMME Software Has Arrived

Monitoring your infrastructure may be a daunting task. It poses many questions and creates uncertainty about possible solutions.

MAGNAPing is the infrastructure monitoring software that makes things easy. It is there, to give our customers a peace of mind. When something goes down, MAGNAPing knows and notifies. Its motto is

IMME: Infrastructure Monitoring Made Easy.

It can monitor: HTTP/HTTPS sites and web services, FTP/SFTP servers, database servers, IP hosts, drives and network shares, UNC paths, and Windows Event Logs.

It can notify via: SMTP emails, transactional email APIs, database server SMTP gateways, SMS/MMS text messages, message queues, Jabber XMPP instant messages or chat rooms, UNIX Syslog.